Guild Wars 2

So this is something I’ve noticed a lot in WvW, on many different servers. The fight starts, there’s a struggle for a few days, and fairly often the rest of the week is just one side holding everything. Not always, but a great deal of the time.

When my server is the one holding everything, there’s nothing much for me to do. I can explore, but that only needs doing once. I can kill NPC’s and harvest, but then why go to WvW for that? I can occasionally defend, but by then we have all the cards and it’s a slaughter. I can’t attack anything, naturally. I get a few badges, then they get bored and quit. Then I get bored and quit. Sometimes I won’t even bother, in the hope they’ll take something back, but this is a pretty hopeless approach because even if they do, it goes the same way it did before.

On the flip side – we’re not ‘losing’ so much as ‘lost’. We have nothing while someone else has everything, or most things. I can cap a supply camp alone if nobody interrupts, but that’s about it. We occasionally take things, only to lose them again. It’s even harder now than it was at the beginning, and we lost then, so frankly there’s not much reason to think we can do well now. I don’t measure the population, but I get the pretty strong sense that a lot of people just stop bothering.

Then I do as well. Good fights are hard to come by, event-wise I’m better off in PvE, and it’s generally just not worth the repair costs. There’s just no incentive to go out there. If I’m going to get nothing, I may as well get better fights and no costs in PvP rather than waste time in WvW.

So, what on earth is up with this system? WvW can be among my favourite things to do when there’s an ongoing battle, but the way it’s designed now seems to intentionally discourage that. It feels very underwhelming.